Field of the Disclosure
Aspects of the disclosure relate generally to wireless communication, and more specifically, but not exclusively, to conditionally disabling discontinuous reception and to maintaining discontinuous reception synchronization between wireless communication apparatuses.
Description of Related Art
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks. Long Term Evolution (LTE), LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), CDMA2000, and Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) are other examples wireless communication networks. As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, research and development continue to advance wireless communication technologies not only to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband access, but to advance and enhance the user experience with mobile communications.
Some wireless communication technologies employ discontinuous reception (DRX) to conserve system resources. DRX defines an ON period for reception at an access terminal such as a user equipment (UE) and an OFF period for reception at the access terminal. Consequently, the access terminal can switch to a low power mode during the DRX OFF period to conserve battery power since the network (e.g., a serving base station) will not be transmitting to the access terminal over one or more specified channels during this DRX OFF period.
In practice, the network and a UE might not be in synchronization (sync) with respect to a DRX cycle. For example, the network might have entered DRX but the UE hasn't, or vice versa. The first scenario would generally result in reduced power savings, but might not otherwise affect communication performance. In contrast, the second scenario could potentially result in the UE failing to receive DL data/signaling information transmitted by the network. Consequently, call drops could occur in this scenario.